Tag Archives: Skepticism

If you don’t understand that there is message in the medium, then you may not be helping

Notice that I didn’t say that the medium IS the message. Just that some of the message is in there. In the medium.

I am forever amazed at how easily compelled my fellow skeptics, and/or my fellow atheists, and/or my fellow feminists, and/or my fellow anti-racists are to tell each other that they are doing it wrong. It was once said (by a straight white male Christian, probably), that “If half the people who make speeches would make concrete floors, they would be doing more good.”

Continue reading If you don’t understand that there is message in the medium, then you may not be helping

Reminder: Skepchicon in Minneapolis in July

The venue, Minneapolis, is well chosen as it is very hard to get an earthquake going on this nice stable bit of crust.

I know it is a bit early, but I’ll remind you of this now and then … as you are making your plans for the summer, consider attending the Skepchicon track at the Convergence thingie in Minneapolis this July.

There will be many other things going on a Convergence. It’s one of those fantasy/sci fi conventions where you wear the Star Wars suit. Well, you don’t have to wear the suit if you don’t want to. And the Skepchicks have a series of things going on:
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What is skepticism?

There are two things I’ve learned over the last year.

1) If you get a room full of self-described skeptics, gathered to converse skeptically about something, a minor tweaking of the conversation can cause an alarmingly large percentage of said “skeptics” to start spewing utter nonsense; and

2) Manyself-described skeptics seem to believe (yes, believe) that nothing can be believed, and assert that the ONLY thing that EVER matters is “the” truth, and at the same time insist that “the truth” can never be trusted (unless they themselves have uttered it). Such an approach can cause said skeptic to wield a skeptical hammer that is so big it obscures their vision to the determent of their intended goal. That a significant subset of these “skeptics” are sociopathic and terribly annoying is unfortunate.

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Don’t forget to tune in tonight!

Omar Mouallem, Desiree Schell and Greg Laden (that’s me) had a very interesting conversation Wednesday night about how skepticism gets noticed. Through comedy, music, blogging, scientific studies, and other outlets, how do we bring people on board? We decided blogging was irrelevant but that music was cool, we came down divided on what some call “attention grabbing stunts” like blasphemy day and killing crackers. And we are going to finish our conversation tonight, on Skeptically Speaking Episode 29.

Be there or be pie! (And we all know pie are square).